Lari’s Writing blog

 Just back from a short family holiday in London, where I dragged my kids round lots of museums I needed to visit for research.    

My favourite was the Ancient Mesopotamia room in the British Museum, which had lots of amazing artefacts from Ancient Sumer, because Ancient Sumer is a time and place I’ve spent a lot of time inside my head recently while researching The Mountain’s Blood, my retelling of the Sumerian myth about Inanna.  When I was writing the book, I did all my research from books, in libraries or online, but in the British Museum, I saw the remains of this fascinating civilisation for real. 

Actual carvings of this goddess whose character I tried to understand, whose story I tried to tell.  Real examples of the very first writing.  A bloke who led a wee tour round the room, who claimed that the Sumerians didn’t just invent writing, but also the wheel!  And a couple of squashed skulls, from the wonderfully named Death Pits – though looking at them made me feel a bit intrusive, because even though these two people died thousands of years ago, I’m not sure if it’s fair to dig them up and put them in cases for us to point at and say, “gross!” and “yuck!”  (Because they were gross!) 

However I also discovered that the British Museum has 130,000 pieces of Sumerian cuneiform writing in its back rooms, and that they are still translating them.  So there might be lots more ‘new’ anicent myths about Inanna and Enki and Utu waiting to be told.   Who knows, I might even retell a few more of them myself!